November 13, 2013

Makibox first prints

The Octopode and frog both came off the makibox HT that I built and calibrated over the last few days. See the previous blog post for my first impressions and a picture of the frog printing inside the box.

I only have an iPhone as my camera, so that’s the best pictures I can take. Anywho — the frog took about 2 hours. It’s printed at 0.2mm layer height. The octopode took about 20 minutes, and it’s at .15mm. The printer can do more than that — I just normally print at 0.20mm with my Makerbot, and wanted references against things I’ve printed before.
It took me a while to calibrate, because I had build errors I had to correct that calibration exposed. It took me about a day to calibrate — I couldn’t get the bed level because I had attached the zip ties used to hold the Z bed together too loosely. I also mis-insalled the Y axis lock slides. Lessons learned — calibrate the bed cold, then heat it and recalibrate it. I tried to do first calibration hot — because the metal bed expands when hot. However, that took way too long. Better to do it cold, then heat it and adjust for the expansion.